


Nature's First Green

by khilari



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, Homeworld - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 13:33:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5092631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khilari/pseuds/khilari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The birth of Peridot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nature's First Green

Peridot comes into existence surrounded by rock. It fits around her perfectly, smoothed and moulded to her form. Light sending a bar across the front of her hole makes her blink and tremble, uncertain whether to step forward or back. Curiosity and fear meet and she tentatively steps forward, to the edge of her hole.

The world is uncomfortable. She recoils, lifting her feet and curling them one after the other, once her soles come into contact with something that isn’t the smooth floor of her hole. Her hands clasp the edges of her hole for balance and find that just as rough. The world is big, too, an open canyon with a sky streaked with a galaxy of stars and a blazing sun she can’t look at. Even looking at the light it casts is uncomfortable, too harsh a contrast between colours and shadow. Flashes of red at the tops of huge machines catch her eyes, then flashes of green — other peridots hesitating as she is on the edges of their holes.

Her gaze alights on them. They don’t all look identical, but they look alike. Large eyes and small bodies, soft little hands and feet, the flash of gemstones on foreheads and cheeks, occasionally on necks or chests. Is this what she looks like? She reaches up and rubs at her forehead, feeling the triangle of her gem and the sensitivity of the skin around it.

Is the world meant to feel so large and immediate? Is she meant to feel so small and incomplete?

Then the other peridots arrive, walking along in pairs. They look like her, too, but different. Taller. Their arms and legs are thick, sturdy, and clank when they walk. Yellow visors sit over their faces, gemstones poking through them, and green fingers float in the air. Something twists inside her, a sense of unfairness, of _wanting_ , and when one approaches her she bares her teeth and lets out a, ‘Nyaarrrrrh,’ sound of frustrated anger.

The other peridot also makes a sound, a cadence that seems to carry more meaning than Peridot’s own, although Peridot can’t decipher it. Glowing fingers grab her wrist, strangely warm against her skin and not uncomfortable, but sudden and implacable enough that she tries to pull them off with her other hand, and then to bite them. They yank her forward suddenly, out into a world she hadn’t yet decided to face, small and naked away from the sheltering hole. The heat and light of the sun overwhelm her, she stumbles and cries out. The fingers curled around her wrist hold her up as she flails, scraping her feet on the rocks in an effort to get them back under her. By the time she succeeds her cries have become whimpers.

As soon as she can balance the other peridot marches her across the canyon floor. The other peridot is making sounds again and the fingers not wrapped around Peridot’s wrist have formed a screen. Looking at the screen is more comfortable than looking at the canyon — it’s full of hypnotic shapes in soft yellow shades — which is why Peridot doesn’t notice the group they’re approaching until she’s been pushed into a chair with other newly formed peridots on either side of her. They look as scared as she feels, while the peridots bustling around them — the bigger peridots, the ones that seem _complete_ — look bored or annoyed. More fingers grab her as a pair of big peridots reach her seat, straightening her leg out, not harshly but not delicately either, and she yowls and tries to kick.

Then something closes around her leg and she stops fighting. It should be frightening, to be still more restrained, but it feels like being encased in the rock again, like comfort. When she looks down she can see that she now has one of the legs the bigger peridots have and she stretches her other leg out willingly for the second. That gets an approving string of sound and the fingers gripping her ease up. Some of the other new peridots whimper or fight through the whole thing, or try to curl up so that several big peridots have to force them to straighten out, but Peridot is _smarter_ than them. She’s figured out the right thing to do, she’s going to get her arms and legs faster, and the big peridots will like her better.

It feels good to rest her feet on the ground and not feel the harsh rock, to not struggle against the instinct to pull them sharply away from the unpleasant texture. It feels good to have her hands tucked away where they feel nothing but smoothness. With only flat wrists, though, she misses being able to grasp at things. When are they going to give her fingers? She twists in her seat, finding a peridot with a tray containing small green cylinders and a tub of something. The peridot dips the end of a cylinder into the tub and presses it to a new peridot’s wrist, where it sticks. Peridot scowls and wrinkles her nose. They’re _doing it wrong_. The older peridots don’t have their fingers stuck to their wrists and these cylinders aren’t glowing. The peridot attaching them isn’t even making an effort to attach them neatly, just shoving five on any old how.

Peridot tries to express her disapproval when her turn comes, wriggling and making grumbling noises, then trying to knock the poorly attached fingers off with her other wrist. It gets a couple of other peridots called over in frustrated tones and her wrists tied to the arms of her chair. She subsides and sulks, glaring at the fingers on the ends of her wrists. She wants to move them, get them off, at least arrange them sensibly. Her gem feels warm, her fingers flash for a brief moment, lighting up the way they’re supposed to.

‘Nyeh hehe.’ Peridot laughs more in surprise than anything. She did that, didn’t she? How to do it again? Focussed on her fingers, mind working to catalogue sensation, her brain moves into a peaceful state for the first time since her emergence. It’s not long before she has them hovering, glue breaking easily once she tries to move them away from her hand. Someone untying her wrists almost goes unnoticed, she’s busy trying to form a screen, even though it won’t go quite right and the best she can manage is a vague yellow glow in a cloud of fingers hovering at odd angles.

Once the new peridots have all mastered at least keeping their fingers floating somewhere near their wrists, they’re pulled out of their chairs onto their feet. Balancing is easier this time — she’d been so light before, as if anything might cause her to fall, now her feet are solid, heavy, connecting her firmly to the ground. They’re herded rather than pulled along this time, prodded into a group following an older peridot with a pentagonal gem on her cheek.

Is that it? Aren’t they going to get clothes and visors too? The older peridots have them. Maybe Peridot isn’t the only one thinking along those lines, because another new peridot tugs at one of the older ones and reaches for her visor, only to get her fingers slapped away with a scowl. The older peridots seem less intimidating now that they’re all the same size, but Peridot still doesn’t want them angry with her. Maybe this is something she’s meant to do for herself? Like her fingers? She tries to capture the warm sensation in her gem again, thinking about the identical clothes all the older Peridots are wearing, and a haze of yellow forms before her eyes, a soft sensation on her skin.

‘Ha!’ She did it, she did it! She forgets herself completely and runs to tug on the arm of the leader, the peridot with the pentagon on her cheek, in her excitement.

To her surprise she gets two approving sounds, addressed straight to her, and a small smile.

Dropping back into the group, Peridot echoes words she doesn’t yet understand, feeling them on her tongue. ‘Faast lerner.’


End file.
